Cardinals fans shouldn't be duped by the team's small-ball persona

Baseball traditionalists can emerge from their niche corners of the internet and bellow it from the rooftops: The bunt is back. A FanSided article pointed out how teams that are bunting more often are seeing more success on offense than those relying on the home run. The article's author, Pete Dwyer, pointed out several teams that are bunting frequently and using it to their advantage, and the St. Louis Cardinals feature prominently within the piece.

The Cardinals have indeed employed the bunt more often than most teams: They've converted eight of 15 sacrifice bunt attempts on the season, which is the third-most attempts in the league. But a crucial piece of information is that the vast majority of the Cardinals' sacrifice bunts are from the same person, as Victor Scott has laid down seven of the team's eight successful sacrifices and makes up 11 of the 15 overall attempts. Scott's seven sacrifices are tops in the league, and he's what's driving the Cardinals' position in these rankings.

At least that's what he was doing before. Five of Scott's seven successful sacrifice bunts were in his first 10 games. In his last 29 games, Scott has only laid down two sacrifice bunts, which heavily skews the data for the Cardinals in Dwyer's article.

The Cardinals have scored 4.68 runs per game, which ranks ninth in the major leagues, and Dwyer argued that Scott's bunting has been a significant contributor to the team's preponderance of runs. But if one looks at the Cardinals' runs per game after Scott's bunting frenzy ended, the number has actually increased slightly: The Cardinals averaged 4.6 runs per game in their first 10 games of the season, when Scott was running wild. Since then, the team has averaged 4.71 runs per game as of May 13.

Therefore, it appears that Scott's bunting had a negligible effect on the Cardinals' success early on and that they are currently winning despite his poor play. In fact, the Cardinals have had Scott on the bench in their last three games, and he's a candidate to receive a demotion to Triple-A Memphis when Lars Nootbaar returns. That would lead to the Cardinals' bunt frequency descending even further.

The real magic is happening on the basepaths via both run and trot

Where the Cardinals are outperforming nearly every other team is in running the bases. The Cardinals lead the major leagues in extra bases taken, at 55%. That stat refers to a runner advancing more than one base on a single or more than two bases on a double. The team is also tied for second in the league at two "baserunning runs" above average and one "runner run" above average.

Dwyer's article mentions that the teams with the best advance rates are generally teams that are built to bunt and favoring a contact-over-power strategy, but the Cardinals don't quite fit that mold. It's not just the aforementioned bunting success being almost completely contained to the first 10 games of the season; the Cardinals also have more pop in their bats than most of the other major bunting teams. (They're ahead of the Athletics, Rays and Brewers, although they're comfortably behind the bunt-happy White Sox in the home run domain.) With 47 home runs, the Cardinals are 12th in the major leagues in that category.

The stats might suggest that the Cardinals are a team that seeks out every extra edge to scratch out runs, but with Scott nearly abandoning what worked for him early on, the team is combining the traditional long ball with an unmatched ability to take the extra base. It's not Whiteyball, but it's an exciting blend of old-school and new-school baseball that's working wonders.

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